The Individual Retirement Account (IRA) brings together two tremendously powerful forces, both of which benefit you: 1) compound interest, and 2) tax savings.

If you've got money that you can afford to invest for the long term, there's really no reason not to open an IRA. Lethargy is not a good reason. Inertia is not a good reason. Keeping your eyes wide shut about your future is not a good reason. Compound interest becomes even more powerful when it is not held back by the drag coefficient of taxes.

While hackers bicker back and forth, all users want is an end to the torrent of worms that's ravaged the Internet this week.

While it's not difficult to stymie one worm, it's a different story when that one becomes a tsunami that just keeps coming, security analysts said Thursday as they offered advice. Unfortunately, said Ken Dunham, director of malicious code research at iDefense, "there's no single magic bullet and no comprehensive patch against all of these new worms."

‘Parasite’ is a shorthand term for “unsolicited commercial software” — that is, a program that gets installed on your computer which you never asked for, and which does something you probably don’t want it to, for someone else’s profit.